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The Myth of the Ethical Consumer’: Why Are We Still Not Ethical Shoppers?

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The Myth of the Ethical Consumer’: Why Are We Still Not Ethical Shoppers? Revisiting ‘The Myth of the Ethical Consumer’: why are we still not ethical shoppers? Carrigan, M Author post-print (accepted) deposited by Coventry University’s Repository Original citation & hyperlink: Carrigan, M 2017, 'Revisiting ‘The Myth of the Ethical Consumer’: why are we still not ethical shoppers?' Journal of Consumer Ethics, vol 1, no. 1, pp. 11-21 https://journal.ethicalconsumer.org/ Publisher: Ethical Consumer Research Association Ltd Material in the JCE is published using the Creative Commons Atribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Copyright © and Moral Rights are retained by the author(s) and/ or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This item cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. This document is the author’s post-print version, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer-review process. Some differences between the published version and this version may remain and you are advised to consult the published version if you wish to cite from it. Carrigan Revisiting ‘The Myth of the Ethical Consumer’: why are we still not ethical shoppers? Professor Marylyn Carrigan1 1 Centre for Business in Society, Coventry University, Coventry, England. “Te myth of the ethical consumer – do ethics mater in purchase behaviour?” (Carrigan & Atala, 2001) appeared in the Journal of Consumer Marketing in 2001. In the article, we examined the context and nature of embryonic ethical consumerism, and studied young consumers in the UK to elicit their atitudes and behaviour towards ethical consumption, corporate social responsibility and corporate irresponsibility. Ethical consumption, environmentalism, political consumerism and social marketing had litle voice in mainstream marketing literature at this time. Research by scholars (for example, Peatie, 2001; Shaw & Clarke, 1999; Prothero 1990) questioned the scale of green consumerism in the UK, atempting to identify and understand the needs of ethical consumers and pondering the weak relationship between what consumers said and what they did regarding responsible consumption. Few academics wrote about marketing ethics, and even fewer studied ethical consumer behaviour. In the UK, for example, the policy and practitioner landscape was also very diferent: no ban on smoking in public places (introduced in 2007), no charges for plastic bags (established 2014-15), or compulsory household recycling2. Corporate criticisms focused on issues such as sweatshop manufacturing; the ethics of marketing tobacco, baby formula and sugary foods, or glamorising anorexic body images. In some ways, ethical consumerism in the UK and elsewhere in 2017 looks very diferent, but in others, we face the same complex and wicked problems, and seemingly insurmountable challenges to motivate consumers and marketers to act ethically. Responses since 2001 to the issues raised in the article regarding ethical consumption and marketing ethics, both within academia and practice, might appear woefully inadequate. Over the years scholars have tried to identify and defne the ethical consumer, questioned the very nature and existence of the concept, speculated on the reasons for the seemingly intractable ethical atitude-behaviour gap, refected on the role of ethical consumption within mainstream marketing and, as the nature and issues surrounding ethical consumption have broadened and deepened, increasingly questioned the agency of the ethical 2 In 2001 landfll tax was £7.00 a tonne not over £80; as costs increased, this regulatory policy eventually drove household recycling rates from 12% (2001) to 44.9% (DEFRA, 2016; Vaughan, 2013). Journal of Consumer Ethics 1(1), April 2017 12 htps://journal.ethicalconsumer.org/ Carrigan consumer within a neo-liberal economy that has increased consumption at its core (Shaw, Chatzidakis, & Carrington, 2016; McDonagh & Prothero, 2014). In 2001 our article highlighted several entrenched barriers to ethical consumption. Tese included: few commercial rewards to being an ethical company, and even fewer penalties to being an unethical one; competing stakeholder interests leading to corporate ethical paralysis; a consumer disconnect between production and consumption such that ethical consumers represented the minority, and most consumers were either informed and complacent, or uninformed and bewildered about consuming ethically. Consumer atitude-behaviour gaps (Hassan, Shiu & Shaw, 2016) persisted despite commercial research suggesting there was a market for ethical goods, while value-action gaps remained as companies ‘greenwashed’ their credentials (Peatie & Crane, 2005). Consumers said they would pay more for ethical goods, but would also buy cheap unethical goods; social responsibility featured litle in their purchase decision (Boulstridge & Carrigan 2000). Consumers sought price, value, quality, and brand familiarity, driven more by personal than societal reasons (Ulrich & Sarasin 1995). Even accounting for some of the methodological missteps (Carrington, Neville & Whitwell, 2014) that might have impacted on the reliability of some early research, when we refect on our knowledge and understanding of the ethical consumer in 2001, the ethical consumer in 2017 appears as mythical as ever. Even so, many scholarly, practitioner and policy shifs have taken place over the last few years, and I believe this should give hope for the future of the ethical consumer. For example, discourses of green and ethical economies, such as ‘circularity’ or ‘alternative consumption networks’ are more frequently articulated in mainstream policy. Tese highlight a growing spectrum of interpretations of ethical and green economies that stretch from ecological modernisation proposals to more radical degrowth change (Gibbs & O’Neill, 2017), some of which are discussed further below. The Elusive Ethical Consumer: what we know, past and present In 2001 the mainly North American or UK-centric research had an overarching bias towards green and environmental issues. Although sustainability is a recognised ‘mega-trend’ (McDonagh & Prothero, 2014), and environmental concerns remain at the core of ethical/responsible consumer behaviour, what it means to be an ethical consumer has grown, shifed and evolved to capture new and forgoten behaviours that tackle social and economic justice. Grassroots social movement organisations now target ethical consumer choices, and social network ties reinforce Journal of Consumer Ethics 1(1), April 2017 13 htps://journal.ethicalconsumer.org/ Carrigan commitment to their goals (Parigi & Gong, 2014). In some cases, traditional activist forms of participative protests (e.g. boycots and rallies) have been replaced by non-contentious collective actions. Te growing body of ethical consumer research illustrates this: we recycle (Gilg, Barr & Ford, 2005), reuse (Cooper, 2005), buy less (Scot, Martin & Schouten, 2014), buy green (Ramirez, Jiménez & Gau,20155), buy Fairtrade (Andorfer & Liebe, 2012); downshif (Moraes, Carrigan & Szmigin, 2012); community garden (Bos & Owen, 2016); save energy (Retie, Burchell, & Riley, 2012); celebrate and desire vintage (Turunen & Leipamaa-Leskinen, 2015); even repurpose waste through initiatives like cafés that serve junk food (Cadwalladr, 2016) and mend throwaway items (Repair Cafés, 2016). New ways of consuming, such as sharing, pooling, renting, borrowing and ideas of liquid consumption (Bardhi, Eckhardt & Arnould., 2012), the shared economy and experiences over products are moving ethical consumer research into new areas. Tese alternative spaces of consumption provide ethical choices that both reduce and rebalance consumption more responsibly, and challenge throughputs of excess consumption and waste. Te 2001 article notes the work of Vance Packard and Ralph Nader, longstanding critics of the power imbalance between marketers and consumers, and early pioneers of the ethical consumer movement. Such criticism of the dominant social paradigm has grown across the research community (Carrington et al. 2014). Geels et al. (2015) suggest we are going forward from ‘reformist’ solutions that focused on pursuing green innovation and green purchasing, to embrace more ‘revolutionary’ approaches that radically critique the mainstream materialist and capitalist dominant social paradigm in favour of frugality, sufciency and localism, and increasingly moving towards ‘reconfguration’ that argues for transitions in socio-technical systems and daily life practices. As well understanding how knowledge that was forgoten can inform future ethical consumption, new technology is changing how we perform ethical consumption and connect communities, with initiatives such as Olio’s food sharing app connecting neighbours and local shops (htps://olioex.com/), local currencies like the Bristol Pound (Ferreira, Perry & Subramanian, 2015) or the Qestionmark fruit and vegetable provenance app that helps consumers protect workers’ rights (htp://www.thequestionmark.org/en). Creative policy change supports ethical consumption choices, such as the Swedish government’s 2017 Budget initiative to cut tax rates on minor repairs to bicycles, shoes and clothing and provide tax refunds to consumers who repair their white goods (Anon., 2016) While
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